Peter Levin’s Rethinking Markets

October 26, 2007

art, bodies, remains, morality, value

Filed under: Art — Peter @ 3:54 pm

There is so much to find interesting in this article on a debate in France over whether or not to return a mummified, tattooed, Maori head. The argument is whether the head should be considered ‘human remains’ and returned as “an act of ‘atonement’ for colonial-era trafficking in human remains,” or an artifact that qualifies as a piece of art. If it is art, it falls under the jurisdiction of a 2002 law stating that works of art are “inalienable.” It is kind of a big deal, in that if the head is considered a body part, all sorts of heads, bones, and mummies would be sent from museums back to their countries of origin, where they would presumably be re-buried. The American Museum of Natural History in NYC apparently has 30 heads.

So what’s interesting here?

First, it is a mummified, tattooed, Maori head.

Second, there is a distinction between the law on the one hand, which calls for a categorical either/or distinction between art/artifact and human remains; and the reality on the other hand, that the head is obviously both a cultural artifact and a desecrated body part and symbol of European colonialism. This will be resolved not by changing the object itself, but through a political argument and resolution over what the head ‘is’. Of course, the head will still be both artifact and body part. But the administrative powers-that-be will make it into one or the other.

Third, another museum in France, the Quai Branly, argues that: a) the heads should definitely stay in France, since they are important cultural artifacts and sending them back to have them buried (and hence destroyed) is “a way of erasing a full page of history”; b) the four heads in the Quai Branly’s collection are “stored in a very special area, and absolutely will not be put on public display,” with access available only for a few experts; and c) they don’t know the heads’ value.

Hidden someplace in this example is something that’s been on my mind with regard to the new-new fashion of hedge funds buying up contemporary art. Art really is a funny kind of commodity, and it really does dance on the boundaries between culture and market. These kinds of controversies are surprisingly common in the Art World, and not just with antiquities and cultural artifacts - British authorities declined also to prosecute Elton John for owning and displaying “Clara and Edda Belly Dancing,” a photograph of two girls dancing around, one of whom is naked. So only buy the “safe” art? That doesn’t seem like a good solution either, since it doesn’t maximize on economic value..

June 11, 2007

Where do Art Prices Come From?

Filed under: Art — Peter @ 10:37 pm

Summary: A study of the ontology of art prices. Art specialists act as market intermediaries who do the important work of making prices know-able. This project consists of two pieces, a quantitative analysis of the relationship between auction estimates and final prices, and a qualitative analysis of interviews with art specialists, private art advisers, and appraisers associated with the Internal Revenue Service.

This project was, in its first iteration, the subject of a research seminar I taught at Barnard College. The members of that seminar were: Whitney Wilson, Jessica Katz, Jessica Blanco, Lena Kim, Cara Ciani-Nangle, Jane Cooper, Michelle Lu, Juliette Premmereur, Emily Luski, and Maria Baibakova. Thank you for your support, you were the most interesting class I’ve taught at Barnard.

December 12, 2006

Thoughts on entanglement

Filed under: Art — Peter @ 7:54 am

A conversation with a student got me thinking about ‘entanglements’ and the role of specialists in dis-entangling art world participants. Michel Callon has done work looking at the theoretical role of economics (as a discipline) on the creation of markets (as real-world instances of economic theory). He argues, with examples, that one of the things that needs to happen is that normal people have to be transformed into economic actors, just as commodities have to be formed from things-in-the-ground to discrete commodities. He argues that one of the main ways economics affects markets is to make more possible these ‘calculative agencies’ - two good examples are cost-benefit analysis and William Cronon’s chapter from Nature’s Metropolis on the making of wheat futures.

As I said to the student, the presentation last week on embeddedness made me think about the creation of market actors in our case. In the Art world, museums have to be made from places-where-we-appreciate-Art to publicity/provenance makers; buyers from appreciators to either patrons or speculators or collectors; etc. All these actors have to have the pieces of them that think about Art (temporarily) downplayed, and the pieces that are part of the market-making machinery foregrounded. Specialists link all these pieces of buyers, advisors, galleries, museums, and consignors together. It only appears as though they are just estimating prices.

This is just first-pass speculation…

October 31, 2006

Commensuration and pricing

Filed under: Art — Peter @ 7:16 pm

One of the striking things from my interview was about the structure of commensuration with regard to pricing art. I’m thinking here about categories. From the interview:

This is a reasonable example. There’s an artist named T., and he was born in [Latin America], and he spent most of his adult career in Paris, he came to New York. For many years he was known as an international modern artist. For some reason, in the course of, since he passed away, he’s been put into the Latin American sales. So his market is mostly Latin American collectors. This season for the first time, we have a T. in the impressionist and modern sale. I mean, he worked in the 30s, mostly with M. and D. and, we have something in our sale. So, that’s a huge thing for an auction house to actually get behind this artist and say ‘actually, it’s an international artist’. That’s what putting T., taking it out of the Latin American sale and putting it into an international modern art sale does. On an individual level, we [pause] basically have to pay a lot of attention to this and make sure that it sells well. Because we want to widen the modern market, we want to make sure that there’s, because there a very kind of pool that can be offered in an impressionist and modern sale, and we find someone who could potentially be included, you want to make sure it’s a successful sale. So on an individual level, what I need to do is get out there and make sure people know that it’s in the sale. Make sure that the people I’ve worked with in the past on T. just know that it’s in the sale, and to really be very diligent about it, so on a level of the, on a corporate level, this could change the market for this artist.

What’s going on here?

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September 19, 2006

Price Ontology versus Price Determination

Filed under: Art — Peter @ 12:11 pm

I’ve been thinking a lot about our research question, and it seems to me that a useful (re)start may be the difference between the ontology of prices and the determination of prices. Ontology normally refers to the study of conceptions of reality. The ontology of price would be an explicit specification of that conceptualization (Gruber 1993: 199). The idea is that we would be trying to understand what price is - how is it made understandable. This is a bit challenging because when we look especially at secondary markets for Art, it is taken for granted that prices already exist. Auctions, as we’ll read Charles Smith’s account of them, are actually designed to help determine prices when there is uncertainty over how much something is worth. But this says less about what makes price itself knowable.

The ontology of prices would look at the shift between a work of Art being price-less and being price-able. This is what I had in mind when we started the semester.

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